It was almost 6 p.m. on Aug. 8 when Faraz Soltani saw that gusting winds had pushed the fire burning through Lahaina, Maui, to the church across the street from his home and knew he had to flee.
“I knew it was a matter of minutes, if not seconds,” Soltani says. “When I saw that, I knew I had to get out.”
Soltani says he ran into his home office and grabbed his car keys, checkbook, some cash and his identification as a Ferndale Police Department reserve officer and left, beginning a surreal escape that saw him drive over downed power lines and through smoke to a place of relative safety. There, with his gas tank nearly empty, Soltani says he sat awake through the night as the fire continued to rage, leveling his home, his business and his rental property.
“It’s all gone,” he says. “Everything is gone. Everything.”
Soltani is in Ferndale this week, fulfilling his seasonal role as a reserve officer helping out during the Humboldt County Fair, as he has for more than a decade. Speaking to the Journal by phone from Pleasant Hill on Aug. 18, Soltani says he’s still trying to process all that’s happened, cycling through emotions — loss, gratitude, anger — while contemplating an uncertain future.
It was chance that first brought Soltani to Ferndale. Growing up, Soltani always looked up to his father, a now retired colonel in Iran who was part of the Shah’s police escort. He says he still pictures him with his immaculate uniform and polished shoes, and can still hear the way he talked to people. Soltani had planned to go back to Iran to follow in his father’s footsteps but the revolution in 1979 “cut off that bridge,” so he did other things, finding a career in water treatment and water systems. But the idea of policing always pulled, Soltani says, saying he felt drawn to the public service aspect of the profession and the chance to make a difference in people’s lives.
“I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of helping people, talking to them, making eye contact with them, trying to help them,” he says.
So, in his mid-30s, Soltani went to the police academy with the goal of making policing a kind of side gig, something he could do to give back. He signed on as a reserve officer in Marysville, where he worked under former Ferndale Police Chief Bret Smith, and later Citrus Heights. When Soltani and his wife, Elisabeta, decided to move to Hawaii in 2011, he mentioned to Smith that he was sad to leave policing behind and Smith, then the chief in Ferndale, said he had a seasonal position available working the fair. Soltani says he jumped at the chance, noting it would allow him to keep his certification current in California and work a couple of weeks a year doing something loved.
“That was a dream come true for me,” he says. “It was a once-in-a-billion-years opportunity to still be a cop.”
There were a few bumps in the road at first, Soltani says, recalling his first shift on foot patrol when he walked into a Ferndale watering hole only to have the bartender later call Smith to say he thought a “fake cop” had stopped by. But he says he quickly came to cherish his annual trip to the North Coast, and became a familiar face, at least a couple weeks a year, with Operation Safe Streets Eureka calling him a “shining example of selflessness and dedication” who spreads “positivity and warmth to everyone he meets.”
The Soltanis built a life for themselves in Lahaina, where their business installing and maintaining water features and aquariums took off and they raised their two sons (14 and 15) and daughter (5).
Soltani says he’s thankful Elisabeta and the kids had traveled to California a couple weeks before the fire broke out. He was only stopping over in Lahaina himself, he says, having arrived Aug. 7, the night before the fire broke out, to finish getting a water system ready for installation on Aug. 8, with plans to catch up with the family the following day.
“It was very, very windy,” Soltani says, adding that a friend who picked him up from the airport said he’d never seen it that gusty.
The morning of the fire, Soltani says he woke up around 4 a.m. to find the power was out. As he worked on the water system throughout the day, he said he was repeatedly interrupted. First, someone texted to say a limb had broken off a tree on his property and was just “dangling” over the house. After dealing with that, a neighbor called to report trees down on his property, and that a panel of another neighbor’s corrugated metal roof had torn off and was blowing around in his yard. Around the time he was securing the 6-by-10-foot piece of metal and assessing the trees, Soltani says he noticed a “quite heavy, thick” plume of smoke coming up from the middle of town, maybe four blocks away, moving toward the ocean.
“Neither me nor my neighbors thought much of it because we’d seen fires before,” Soltani says. “I thought that if at some point we needed to evacuate, law enforcement or the fire department would announce it, or the alert system would go off, or we’d get a text alert. None of that happened.”
So Soltani says he kept doing things around the house, getting ready to head out of town, periodically checking on the smoke plume to see if it was coming closer.
“Here’s what I didn’t know: I did not know that the fire hydrants were out of water. I did not know the firefighters were not fighting the fire. I did not know the fire was just ravaging through Lahaina,” he says. “I didn’t know any of that.”
By the time Soltani says he realized the severity of the situation, there was no time to do anything but try to save himself. He says he regrets not getting his wife’s wedding ring out of the safe, or taking the laptop with years of family photos on it, but he’s also not convinced the couple of minutes saved didn’t make all the difference.
Soltani says his heart sank when got into his car and saw the gas light on and realized the tank was nearly empty — “I’m a cop, I should have known better” — and recalled the smoke was thick when he drove down Shaw Street from his home looking for a path to safety. He says he came to a T-intersection. To the left, he says, he could see fire and thick smoke. To the right, it was clear, so he went right. He says he quickly came upon a couple of power poles, their wires splayed across the road.
“I figured, what choice do I have,” he says, adding that he drove over them and continued on about 5 miles to a point he felt it was safe to stop before he ran out of gas.
There, he says he sat in his car all night, dazed. At some point, he says, a woman in a BMW parked next to him and got into his car. They talked for a while, he says, until she went back to her car to try to get some sleep. In the morning, he says he flagged down a passing motorist, who told him, “Lahaina is gone.”
Soltani says he’s still working to process how Maui — one of the world’s prime tourist destinations — could have been so ill-prepared for disaster.
Having served for years on the Maui County Commission on Persons with Disabilities, Soltani says he’d come to see the island’s government had a pretty lax approach to infrastructure improvement, saying that while areas around resorts would be fixed up, that wasn’t the case in neighborhoods. It also apparently wasn’t the case with the island’s water system, which collapsed under the strain of the fire, leaving hydrants dry.
While no official cause has yet been identified for the fire, many believe it was sparked by an active power line that fell in the high winds. Soltani says he thinks this is likely, noting that old power poles were never replaced on the island until they fell.
“They would simply wait for them to fail,” he says. “They never did preventative maintenance.”
But the thing that’s most frustrating to Soltani is that seemingly no one spread the word through the city that residents needed to leave as the fire raged out of control. He says there’s a tsunami alert system with towers throughout the city — including one just blocks from his house — that are tested every Monday and could have been used but wasn’t. While officials have said they feared sounding the alert would have sent habituated residents fleeing the sea toward the fire, Soltani says he feels “people would have used logic” and known the siren was warning of the fire. But Soltani says there were also no police cars with public address systems urging residents to leave, or anything other than neighbors telling neighbors.
Soltani sighs over the phone. He recalls that he twice went to the local police department to talk to two different chiefs about becoming a reserve officer and was told both times he was needed and the department would be in touch, but no one ever followed through.
“Can you imagine if Lahaina had five, 10 reserve officers who could have been deployed to help evacuate people? How many lives they could have saved?” he says.
As the Journal went to press Aug. 22, Maui police had confirmed 115 people had been killed in the fire, while more than 800 remained unaccounted for. Soltani says Lahaina is a small community and everyone’s been touched by the loss of life, noting that one of his son’s co-workers’ grandparents died in their car, while one of his employee’s sister and brother-in-law are missing.
“It’s such a small community, even if I don’t know somebody by name there’s a good chance I know them by face,” he says.
Less than two weeks removed from the disaster, Soltani says he’s still processing all that’s happened and what it means, noting he’s gone from denial and disbelief to a resignation that he probably won’t be able to pay his mortgage with his business and his income gone.
“I’m now realizing we’re so under insured,” he says.
Some family, friends and former co-workers — including some from Humboldt — have started sending the Soltanis donations through Elisabeta Soltani’s Venmo account, Faraz Soltani says, which is both helpful and touching.
The future is daunting, he says, and the anger at knowing so much of the loss of life and property was preventable is growing. But Soltani says he also knows it could have been so much worse.
“I keep telling myself, ‘I’m safe. My family is safe,'” he says. “By the grace of God.”
Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.
This article appears in Not Expelled but Not Fully Welcome.
